Every season of the year can affect a human being's thought patterns, but nothing plays on our darkest emotions quite like the depths of winter. There is something almost tangible in the despair that besets otherwise happy people when they have been trapped inside their warm abodes with their loving families for weeks on end. What follows are a handful of the nuggets that rattled loose from my brain in January of 2014 as it tried valiantly to ward off the fever that threatens to melt it down whe